Saving Mozilla

We often forget what Mozilla has made for us. Internet wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for that group of developers that took Netscape web browser and transformed it into an Open Source project called Mozilla at first and then Firefox.

That project was one milestone of a road that was always synonym of freedom and openness (would I dare to say… ‘unshutness‘?). Since that moment, Mozilla has stayed independent and has fought against much bigger companies with much deeper pockets.

It has suffered the consequences, of course. Firefox lost part of its market share due to the popularity (and good features) of Chrome, and other projects suffered from the Open Source curse: it doesn’t matter if it’s better, they’re probably “only suited for geeks”.

The Firefox web browser is just the best example of what defines Mozilla: a defense of open standards for an open web. There are lots of other additional efforts to defend that idea. Lots of them.

So when you find arguments like the ones Psy-Q’s Braindump has showed on his excellent post, you can’t help thinking about what Mozilla has made for us. BTW, this discussion on Hacker News explains it well: the donations are for The Mozilla Foundation (manifesto) which “relies entirely on donations”. Mozilla Corp -the one behind Firefox development- “makes money through corporate deals (e.g. Google and Yahoo! search commissions)”.

Javier Pastor is a technology journalist that has been writing about tech since 1999. He started writing for PC Actual in Spain, the leading printed magazine in the country, and in 2006 started to write online. First as the Chief Editor for The Inquirer ES, and after that for MuyComputer until 2013. That year he became senior editor at Xataka, the leading tech news website in Spanish with over 5M uniques/month (Aug'15, comScore). Xataka is part of Weblogs SL, a blog network that gets over 40M uniques/month and that has a wide catalog of publications in Spanish.
The Unshut is his new venture and allows him to express his opinions and thoughts on everything touched by technology, and follows what he has been doing at Incognitosis, his personal blog, since 2005.